Virtual Dice Tray Tips

General Behavior

As dice are moved off the visible area, or as the window is made smaller, scroll bars will appear allowing you to access all your dice. However, I've found it much easier to organize lots of dice by putting them in multiple documents and opening all the documents at once. Then I Ctrl-Tab between them or select them from the Window menu.

Dice colors can be set by right-clicking on a selection and going to the Colors sub-menu.

Adding Multiple Dice

Right-clicking and dragging from the dice toolbar gives you the option to add lots of dice at once.

The last three entries in the right-click menu above start as Add 3, Add 4 and Add 5, but change to become the last three numbers of dice you added. For example, if you use Add n... to add 7 dice, then Add 4 to add four more, the list will change to Add 4, Add 7 and Add 3.

File Menu

Typing in the name of a file that doesn't exist in the File > Open... dialog will create an empty dice bag file with that name and open it.

Edit Menu

Pasting dice using the right-click menu places them where the original right-click occurred. Paste from the menu or Ctrl+V pastes them at the same position they were copied from, but selects them for immediate moving.

Plain text in the format "Label: #d#+#" can be copied from other applications and right-click pasted into the Virtual Dice Tray.

Adding text using the right-click menu places the text where the original right-click occurred.

View Menu

In the Properties dialog under View > Properties..., the Multiplier edit box accepts fractions in the form "1/2". This is intended to allow setup of a d3 as 1/2 d6.

In both the Properties dialog and the live modifier edit, the number can be incremented and decremented using the up/down arrow keys.

The Properties dialog can be used to set the modifier, multiplier, and/or title on multiple dice at once.

Dice Menu

Dice can be grouped together by simply dragging and dropping them onto each other.

Advanced Hacks

You can download a .dbg generator file for PCGen here (right-click and save as - I believe you have to place this in an htmlxml folder somewhere in the folders inside PCGen's outputsheets folder so PCGen export can find it). If you track your character in PCGen, you can use File > Export > ...standard and this file to save off a dice bag with dice preset with modifiers for initiative, saves, skills and weapon damage.

A while back, I experimented with n-sided dice. I wound up having the program draw them as circles with the result over the number of "sides". It looks like I never took that code out. You can hack a d2 (or however many sides you want) this way:

Save a .dbg file with at least one die in it.

Open it in your favorite text editor, and find the main line defining the die:<die modifier="0" multiplier="1" sideCount="20" rawResult="18">

Save. When you open it in the Dice Tray you'll have a flat round ugly d2. Once you've got one you can copy/paste it around to get more, or hack other dbg files.

If you look in C:\Program Files\Virtual Dice Tray (presuming you installed to the default location), you'll find an images directory, with subdirectories named for colors. These subdirectories are where the pretty dice images come from. The Color menu is built from those subdirectories and the files (named d4, d6, d8, etc.) therein, which means you can add your own custom dice. Got a set you really love? Snap a digital photo, scale 'em, scrub off the top number and save 'em to a subdirectory and they'll show up as a new color. You don't have to create a full set if you don't want to, Dice Tray is smart enough to only let you set colors that are available for each type of die. It handles both gif and jpg formats.
There are some extra sets available for download here.

The above two tricks can be used together to give your d2s (or other hacked dice) an image. Simply create a d2.gif in one of the color subdirectories and you can then set the color of your hacked dice. You might need to do this if your game know no limit.

Q: My skill system uses multiple d20s at once - you roll several of them and take the highest. I could certainly just use Virtual Dice Tray like I would physical dice and group several d20s together for the roll, but is there any way to hack something together so that I can get a single roll that calculates this automatically?
A: Virtual Dice Tray has an Ignore Lowest Die feature. It was intended for setting up 4d6-ignore-lowest groups for rolling ability scores. When I implemented it, I left the door open for ignoring more than one low die. So, here's what you can do:

Drop in some d20s and group them together.

Select them and copy, then paste into your preferred text editor.

The second line should be:<dicegroup ignoreCount="0" modifier="0" multiplier="1" title="">

Set the number next to ignoreCount to one less than the number of dice in the group (so if you have three dice, set it to 2):<dicegroup ignoreCount="2" modifier="0" multiplier="1" title="">

Finally, select the modified text and paste it back into Virtual Dice Tray. You should get a group of dice with red X's through all but one die.

Be aware that if you use Ctrl+V or the Edit menu to Paste, the new group will sit on top of the original one. See the Edit Menu section above for details.

Current list of possible new features

Want to suggest a new one? Want to see one of these made a higher priority? See the Help > About box for my email address.

Currently working on: Paste special for different text formats ("Spot +5" -> a d20 with a +5 modifier labeled Spot, for example)

Currently working on: More text - multi-line text blocks as well as the single-line labels

Add wizard to tie custom buttons to dice groups that increment/decrement modifiers and change text (for temporary spell effects, etc.). A more complicated but possibly more useful version of Increment/Decrement Modifier, above.

A grouping option that counts successes vs a target number rather than calculating sums.

Allow the user to dock the dice bar horizontally across the top or bottom

Ability to import an image (jpg, png, whatever) that could show up as the background of the dice tray window. That way more ambitious players could put up pictures of their PCs (or something) behind their dice setups. Allow for centered and tiled images.